By the age of 14, I had driven a Group C Jaguar XJR-9 around the Nordschleife, conquered the Col de Turini in Colin McRae’s Impreza and crashed a Veyron at 250mph. At least that’s what I told my mum.
Sim racing is, quite simply, the most accessible and tangible way to revel in cars when the real thing is beyond your means. I’ll spare you the sob story but, as the middle of three children to a single mum in suburban London, there was simply no way I was getting behind the wheel of a go-kart or out on a farm in a knackered old Land Rover: we couldn’t afford it.
What I could afford, though, was a Logitech G27 steering wheel and pedal set, purchased for the princely sum of £150 by saving up all my Christmas, birthday and pocket money for a year.
Bolted to my bedroom desk and hooked up to a PlayStation 3 with a fan so loud you would have thought Concorde was taking off, it was a lifeline for someone utterly obsessed with cars but with no opportunity to really get involved. And there was genuine craftsmanship honed in doing so, too.
Thanks to the lifelike handling offered by games such as Gran Turismo 6 and Dirt 3, I learned the basics of car control: the bum-puckering looseness of a Toyota MR2’s rear end when slowing from high speed while cresting the hills of the fictional Deep Forest Raceway; the utter silence of steering feel that descends when you hit a patch of Alpine ice in a classic Mini; the sheer joy of putting terrible tyres on a BMW M4 and attempting to slide the entirety of the glorious Streets of Willow circuit.
No longer was I a misfit schoolboy battling quadratic equations and, er, the Battle of Trafalgar: I was Ayrton Senna, John Cleland, or whoever I damn pleased – just as soon as I’d eaten my tea and done the dishes, anyway.
Racing games are a fantastic teaching tool. Don’t take my word for it: take that of the legions of professionals who got their break in this world. Rally driver Jon Armstrong, for example, won the World Rally Esports Championship in 2018 and today competes in the actual World Rally Championship. And Formula 1’s leading light, Max Verstappen, is almost as passionate about digital racing as the real thing.
As for little old me, I passed my driving test first time out with zero minors. Yes, that’s a brag, and no, it’s not a championship title, but it’s an achievement that I credit entirely to those years spent in my bedroom learning the fundamentals of operating a car. Because by the time I was finally in the driver’s seat, I already knew roughly how to make the machine work and could just concentrate on doing so safely, within the confines of the rules.
If you have a budding young enthusiast in the house at a loss as to what to do in their spare time, get them a good force-feedback wheel and pedal set and some games to play with it. Gran Turismo is a great start. You might just have a future champion on your hands – or, at the very least, you’ll make them a much safer, more engaged driver when the time comes.